openpi-basic-control

Warning

openpi-basic-control is meant to be a minimal but hackable working example. It is not thoroughly documented or tested, and should not be considered a production-quality solution. We (Physical Intelligence) may not have the bandwidth to maintain this repository, or review any contributions. Feel free to fork it instead!

openpi-basic-control is a minimal C++ robot-control library. Each arm runs one pi_control_node process that communicates with the main Python process via ZeroMQ.

Arm	Follower effector	Leader effector
Yam	E_Yam	E_Yam_Handle
ARX_X5	E_ARX	E_ARX_ENC
FR3	Robotiq	—

from openpi_control import ArmConfig, ArmSession, PositionCommand, SocketCanConnection

with ArmSession() as session:
    follower = session.add_follower(
        ArmConfig(
            "right_follower",
            "Yam",
            SocketCanConnection("can_follower_r"),
            effector_model="E_Yam",
            follower_gravity_compensation=True,
        )
    )
    session.connect()
    follower.command(PositionCommand([0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], 1.0))

FR3 uses the same ArmSession, FollowerArm, and PositionCommand API. Its connection selects one of the two real Robotiq Modbus transports:

from openpi_control import FR3Connection, RobotiqConnection

config = ArmConfig(
    "follower",
    "FR3",
    FR3Connection("192.168.1.10"),
    effector_model="Robotiq",
    effector_connection=RobotiqConnection.rtu("/dev/serial/by-id/usb-robotiq"),
    # Or: RobotiqConnection.tcp("192.168.1.11", port=502),
)

See docs/fr3.md for firmware, networking, controller, and hardware-validation details.

Building from source

Building requires CMake and a C++17 compiler. The dependency builder pins and builds Pinocchio, ZeroMQ, cppzmq, Trossen, libfranka 0.21.3, and libmodbus; the resulting libfranka and libmodbus archives are linked into pi_control_node. It has been tested on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04.

sudo ./scripts/install_build_deps_ubuntu.sh
./scripts/build_deps.sh
uv build --wheel

The wheel is written to dist/.